“Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.”

Art is the pulse of a nation.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

I wish that I was where I am.

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.

I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.

Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

You are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

This joy you feel is life.

Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.

Let me listen to me and not to them.

One positive thought produces millions of positive vibrations.

I don’t like hearing Beatles songs in commercials. It almost renders them useless. I think, ‘Oh God, another one bites the dust.’

When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.

To practice Dhamma means to observe and examine oneself.

For a songwriter, you don’t really go to songwriting school; you learn by listening to tunes. And you try to understand them and take them apart and see what they’re made of, and wonder if you can make one, too.

Children make up the best songs, anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don’t want it.

If there’s one thing you can say about mankind, there’s nothing kind about man.